We don’t cover video games on this site as much as we used to, but it’s difficult to ignore a title like “Quantum Break,” which was originally teased during the reveal of the Xbox One back in 2013. That’s because it’s unlike anything you’ve ever played before – a uniquely immersive experience that’s one part video game, one part live-action TV series. But to fully understand how the merging of these two mediums works, you first need to know what the game is about.

Set in a fictional Northeastern town that’s been overtaken by an enigmatic corporation known as Monarch Solutions, the story follows Jack Joyce (Shawn Ashmore), who returns home after years of trying to escape his past when he receives a cryptic message from his friend Paul Serene (Aiden Gillen) asking him to meet at Riverport University. It turns out that Paul has been secretly building a time machine, and with his investors threatening to pull the plug on the project, he needs Jack’s help to prove that it actually works. But when the experiment goes horribly wrong and causes a fracture in time, Jack and Paul are affected in different ways; Jack is granted the ability to manipulate time, while Paul can see into the future.

Forced to go on the run after he’s framed for the incident, Jack must team up with his physicist brother Will (Dominic Monaghan) and a Monarch security officer named Beth Wilder (Courtney Hope) to stop Paul – who has returned from the future a changed man – from exploiting the time fracture for his own personal gain. If that sounds incredibly ambiguous, that’s because saying any more would be wading into major spoiler territory.

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